WEBVTT

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the mobile processors that we use in our smartphones are super efficient which

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helps them run cool enough to build into these amazingly portable devices that we

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carry in our hands and store in our pockets

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or are they what if i told you that the only reason

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you don't burn your fingers when you're playing a game on your smartphone or

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rendering a video for your twins to snap talk account is that your phone's

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processor is constantly throttling down its performance to limit its thermal

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output and its power consumption well you likely wouldn't be surprised we have

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explored this topic before and we did find that it was possible to unlock a

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significant amount of extra performance by water cooling the back of a

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smartphone but as so many of you pointed out that solution isn't very practical

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for a wide variety of reasons so let's

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take a look at a couple of ways of cooling the snapdragon 855 that don't

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involve liquid one is the red magic 3 a gaming phone

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which has a fan inside it like a computer would and the other is

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this a thermoelectric cooler that you can

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clip onto your phone

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modmic's new lineup features the new mod mic usb the new modmic uni a complete

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revamp of their original 3.5 millimeter mic and the modmic wireless check them

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all out now at the links in the video description first things first though i

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need to get a heavy application running on my phone and i need to establish a

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baseline so conveniently this is the exact same phone that i used last time

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it's a galaxy s10 plus and we're going to be using 3dmark firestrike just like

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last time which saves me an awful lot of time all right so let's take a look at

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this thing tech coolers leverage the peltier effect to convert a difference

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in electric voltage to a difference in temperature

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in simpler terms it means that if you hook a battery up to one one side gets

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cold while the other side gets really hot so let's open this thing up now

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the usefulness of the cold side i should think would be pretty obvious you want

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to hook it up to whatever you want to cool and techs actually get used for

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everything from beverage cooling pads to large scale industrial heat pumps unlike

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a phase change or hvac system attack is

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compact has no moving parts and is

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capable of running completely silently that is

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until you get to the part where you have to deal with the hot side all the heat

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from your processor or whatever else it is you're trying to keep cool doesn't

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magically get sucked into another dimension it still has to be dealt with

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and on top of that you've got to dissipate

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the waste heat from the tech because techs have another dirty secret they are

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extremely inefficient which means that they consume a ton of power compared to

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just throwing a heat sink and a fan on whatever it is you're trying to keep

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cool and that is where hi yes

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contestant number two comes in this red magic 3 gaming phone was sent

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to me months ago by nubia and i had actually intended to do a full review of

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it but just never got around to it life got in the

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way etc i'm still really interested though in one of its key gimmicks as

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we've discussed before calling a heat pipe liquid cooling is pretty misleading

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even if it is technically true but this is one of the only smartphones

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in existence that actually has a cooling

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fan and ventilation holes so we're going

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to clear some space here and we are going to put both of these

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head-to-head now for the red magic 3 i am expecting

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pretty good results this is the same snapdragon 855 soc as this samsung but

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it's got a cooling fan i mean bear in mind there could still be

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some big differences i mean the firmware that these devices ship with are very

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different from each other this one has a 90hz display unfortunately i don't have

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a convenient way to put a fan in an s10 plus or take a fan out of this one so

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from a head-to-head standpoint this is kind of the best we can do

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as for the galaxy s10 plus i've never actually used one of these and i didn't

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watch or read any reviews of it so

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i have no idea what to expect from this but i will tell you it looks kind of

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goofy in terms of positioning i ran a quick

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run of 3dmark slingshot extreme and just kind of felt the back of the phone for

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which parts were heating up the most and it was right around the logo here you

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can actually see that the thermal pad is not making great contact with the part

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of the phone that was heating up the most it's a little bit off to the left-hand side there i would have rather

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had it more in the middle but unfortunately there doesn't appear to be

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any way that i can reposition it because that right there

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is actually the tech that's it so putting it here wouldn't be

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good that is not metal that is just chrome finished plastic and would not

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result in good cooling performance oh right um compared to water cooling a

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phone i guess this is a mild inconvenience you have to plug it in

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well yeah i mean how else would you power it right you convert electricity

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to cooling you should be able to just plug it into

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the phone yeah i mean on some devices you probably

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could but i don't know what kind of current it draws and that would suck

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your battery life even faster than gaming sucks up all your battery life so

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um like i can see why it's just like oh

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where's my battery bank when you need one right wow

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that sounds like the cheapest bearing that i have heard in a good long while

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can you hear that yes

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it's awful okay and then there's the light toggle

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it's just one led down at the bottom there head to head time boys and girls

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one two three go

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right out of the gate our red magic three is scoring significantly higher

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than our s10 plus let's go ahead and do a second run here

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this is fascinating so we're on test number two and there's a couple of

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takeaways here one is that the results of our s10 plus perfectly match up with

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our control test so with the pelje cooler it's definitely

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not getting any worse and our red magic 3

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absolutely creamed the s10 plus even

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before any thermal throttling sets in thanks to presumably the higher clock

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speeds it can run at thanks to that integrated fan cooler now it's

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definitely quieter than the fan on the tech cooler pretty sure i can feel the

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heat coming out of it we do have a way to check though wow the casing of this thing is toasty

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even with the cooling fan the back is quite warm no drop in performance after

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two runs but that's exactly what we were expecting based on our previous

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experience with the s10 plus now we're gonna see if this cooler makes

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a difference on the third fourth and fifth runs

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and we'll also see how the red magic three keeps up interesting so

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we still didn't fall much but

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maybe a little less

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this next run this is going to be where we know for sure

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we've got a drop guys so wait why am i excited about this that

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that's terrible uh we were hoping to not have a drop on

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the s10 plus the good news is the red magic three is actually doing really

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well time for run number five

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with a pretty good idea already of which approach is going to result in the best

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performance now i'm kind of curious about the user

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experience so i'm going to put a piece of tape across the back of the phone

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which is going to help with the reflectivity issues that you can get

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using a thermal camera to try to measure the temperature of something

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shiny as for the samsung the surface temperature is quite a bit lower which

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might seem to suggest that our cooler is working

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except that the performance of the phone isn't getting any better we're also getting a

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really good look at the heat coming off of the cooler itself so you can see the

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hot side here see all this is heated up and then this

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cooling fan is drawing room temperature air in and then dissipating it around

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here okay we've got our next result in the red magic 3 is still holding up and

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we are down to 4 800 on the s10 plus

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something that surprised me when i was working on a video about phone thermals a while ago was how much of the heat

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that the device generates is expected to be dissipated from the screen i made the

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assumption that because the housing is metal in many cases that that's where

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they would want to dissipate heat from but in fact because you make less

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contact with the screen some phone designs actually strive to utilize the

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screen as a heat dissipation surface as much as they possibly can

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samsung is sitting right around 35 and a

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half degrees the red magic

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even with the cooling fan this thing is paying a price

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for having that amped up processor in

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there so you can really see the hottest spots too i'm actually gonna have to put new

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pieces of tape to measure the hottest points it's cool it's like being able to do

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like a thermal you know x-ray of where the heat

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generating components are inside the device so on the samsung you can see

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that we actually nailed the location for the thermal pad on our tech

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it's right there on the back and what's really cool is check that out you can

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actually see that cold spot that's at 18 i got as low as 18 17 degrees

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on that point right there unfortunately it just doesn't have enough power to

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draw away enough heat or it's not covering a big enough area to really

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make a difference according to the numbers we've recorded so far

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meanwhile over on the red magic 44 and a half degrees

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wow that is really toasty you can really

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feel it too quite similar on the back 42

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somewhere in that neighborhood the phones are all cooled down now the final result is in and i gotta admit i am

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actually impressed as i went through i was watching that

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the thermal throttling was kicking in at around the same time as when we ran the

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s10 plus bareback but what i didn't realize was that while our original

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scores for opengl were 4 000 something

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they were in the neighborhood of around 4100 so we are actually looking

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at just about a 10 increase in gaming performance for

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having this stupid cooler clip to the back of the thing

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so does it work as well as our water

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cooling solution or does it work as well as just

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having proper cooling built into the phone in the first place

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no no it doesn't but it does yield a

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difference and it costs so little that as long as you don't mind

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looking like a bit of an idiot if you have a game that's on the threshold of

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like running smoothly or being playable

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but it might actually work go figure right

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and you don't have to deal with you know this bulky like super hot you know

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gaming gaming phone type approach to things although there is something to be

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said for that as well with how much raw performance this thing pulled out of its

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back pocket and then sustained even across six runs this video is brought to

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linked in the video description so thanks for watching guys if you enjoyed this video maybe go check out the water

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cooled phone video that we did a little while ago if you haven't already it

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contains some learnings that we did not investigate today

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pretty impressed by this thing overall though who to thunk it you know putting a fan

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in a heatsink on something keeps it cool right brandon what concept